Abstract
Across early modern Europe, scholars focused on producing up-to-date genealogies of Europe's myriad noble families. In doing so, they increasingly defined what it meant to be noble and contributed to changing definitions of nobility. The Maker of Pedigrees explores the career of Jakob Wilhelm Imhoff (1651–1728), an important but neglected figure in the scholarly landscape of the Holy Roman Empire, a Nürnberg patrician, and a leading genealogist at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Friedrich's book is a much-needed contribution to the histories of European scholarship and genealogy which makes an engaging case for why genealogy was so important to early modern Europeans.
Drawing on Imhoff's surviving working notes, papers, and over one thousand of his letters, Friedrich's work is an important and archivally rich contribution to the history of early modern genealogy. Arguing that early modern Europeans looked at the world with a ‘genealogical gaze’ (3), Friedrich demonstrates that genealogy played an important role in political conflicts, including the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), and that it was frequently used in legal disputes. Focusing on Imhoff's methodologies and his popularization of the genre of ‘encyclopedic’ genealogy (38), the book argues that Imhoff was instrumental in creating the concept of the nobility as a unified social group in the eyes of his readers.
Friedrich frames his work as a contribution to the history of scholarship and as part of a challenge to preconceived notions of family, demonstrating the ways in which genealogy affected conceptions of the family to depict it as existing across time. The first chapter explores the state of genealogy at the turn of the seventeenth century, arguing that the discipline was practised in different ways at royal and noble courts, in legal and institutional settings, and by scholars writing for the early modern book market. The second chapter assesses Imhoff's background as a patrician in Nürnberg and the ways in which his social standing influenced his scholarly practices. Friedrich considers Nürnberg as a ‘site of knowledge’ (56) and argues that Imhoff utilized his family's position and networks, as well as the city's status as a hub of information and exchange, to gain access to genealogical data.
Friedrich then turns to consider the interplay between Imhoff's genealogies and the nobility, arguing that Imhoff's project was attractive to many nobles because its encyclopaedism gave Imhoff an air of objectivity and authority (Chapter 3). The fourth chapter explores Imhoff's creation of what Friedrich calls a ‘republic of genealogists’ (111). Friedrich explores Imhoff's ability to correspond across denominations and polities and to connect various highly localized information networks into a greater network on genealogy. Chapter 5 analyses Imhoff's way of work, drawing on his working papers. Friedrich argues that Imhoff utilized a material process of ‘bricolage’ (143) to piece together the variegated materials which he gathered, and analyses his practice of drawing and re-drawing genealogical diagrams, demonstrating the visual nature of early modern genealogy. Genealogy was a material discipline and its practitioners worked with ‘scissors, glue, needles, and slips of paper’ (143). In the final chapter, Friedrich explores the ways in which Imhoff and his publishers made use of the contemporary book market to produce economically successful genealogical products, how Imhoff managed his scholarly profile, and how readers read and interacted with his work to use it for their own purposes.
The Maker of Pedigrees thus contributes much to our understanding of the practice of genealogy in the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. Through his focus on Imhoff, Friedrich uncovers the wider arena of early modern European genealogy, and the book goes far in integrating genealogy into the history of scholarship and uncovering the scholarly and epistolary practices of a genealogical subset of the Republic of Letters. Its strengths lie in its rich and detailed presentation of Imhoff's correspondence and working papers, as well as in its argument for the political importance of genealogy and the discipline's links to developments in early modern scholarship and the book market. The Maker of Pedigrees is a valuable, engaging, and erudite work of scholarship which will be of interest to historians of scholarship and culture, as well as scholars working on the European nobilities and the Republic of Letters.